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11 July 2016

Language & Landscape in West China & Tibet

The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of
West China and Tibet

By
Erik Mueggler

(University of California Press,
2011)

In a sense this is a book of binary
opposites. Archive and experience. Language and perception. Reading and
writing. European explorers and Asian explorers. Outsiders and insiders.
Collaboration and conflict. Exploitation and support. Man and Nature. This is a
dialectic study in fascinating conversation with itself.

At first glance The Paper Road appears to be an examination of the lives and careers of two distinctly
different botanists working in the same area of West China in the early decades
of the twentieth century, but it is in fact centred upon a single indigenous
community. The book pivots upon a small Naxi village and a group of local men,
who through two generations assisted the two botanists - George Forrest and
Joseph Rock. These local Naxi men, as Erik Mueggler amply demonstrates, are the
silent experts operating tirelessly in the background with great devotion,
applying their own detailed knowledge of the flora and terrain of their native
region to both guide and inform their two western patrons - as such, they are
the unsung collaborators which this study seeks to unearth afresh from
historical obscurity.

Forrest and Rock could not be two
more radically opposing personalities. Temperamentally and operationally they
were quite different men. Forrest was a steady, methodical, hard-working
scientist with ambitions to climb up from his modest social background, using
his expeditions to "get on" by pursuing botanical collecting for both
commercial and scholarly ends. Rock on the other hand was a flamboyant drifter,
a man of all-consuming but flighty passions. He arrives in West China as a
sponsored botanical collector but eventually leaves, after many expeditions
over the course of many decades, as a patronless collector of books. Forrest is
altogether uninterested in his largely nameless native guides, whereas Rock,
although despising many of the locals he encounters, nevertheless becomes
fascinated by their curiously unique pictographic language. Having
disappointed, let down or offended his various botanical sponsors, he shifts
his focus away from plants and instead studies the Naxi language (and
there-by-extension, Naxi culture too) almost obsessively throughout the course
of his later expeditions, becoming immovably bogged down in his own language in
the process. Forrest is neat and methodically scientific, whereas Rock, who is
also rigorously scientific in certain capacities, nonetheless is prone to
flights of fancy and exaggeration - the showman who "plays it" up for
the editors of The National Geographic Magazine (who are sometimes funding
him), declaring he has found a mountain which is higher than Everest, but then
ultimately fails to submit his promised copy.

Both men are prejudiced against the
local populations they encounter and as a consequence each can be decidedly
heavy-handed in their dealings with local authorities and ordinary lay-people
alike. Forrest abhors being the constant focus of their vapid gaze, Rock
despises and obsessively rails against the excessive filth he encounters
everywhere. Forrest is there to get his job done in order to satisfy and
impress his patrons back home. Rock is a restless wanderer who always seems to
circle back to the same location, either fantasising about settling down there
to an idyllic pastoral life or hastily running away at the prospect of
impending trouble or upset. Whilst Forrest seeks to use the enhanced prestige
he automatically enjoys as a foreigner (protected by the exemption from being
subject to local laws under the terms of extra-territoriality), he ultimately
hopes his expeditions will make his name and enable him to move on in society
back home; Rock, on the other hand, doesn't seem to fit in back home, and so he
is constantly on the move; also enjoying the foreigner's natural sense of
privilege, but, it is suggested, he is perhaps striving to find fulfilment in a
life socially removed from the restraints and taboos back home in Europe and
America.

This book is not a work of
straightforward biography however. Nor is it a simple history. Erik Mueggler is
an anthropologist who has himself worked in this particular region of West
China. He is primarily interested in the interaction of text and landscape,
hence he uses Forrest and Rock as cultural-historical lenses through which to
'read' the local societies, in particular the Naxi; using the personal records
- diaries, letters, labels, photographs, maps, and notes - associated with the
collecting expeditions of Forrest and Rock which survive in various
institutional archives, to examine how both the two Western botanists, as well
as their Naxi counterparts, each read, interpreted, codified, and transcribed
the landscape around them. Such a novel and highly nuanced technique renders
the book's wide-ranging subject matter into a fascinating composite of
'archival' readings which operate on multiple levels. As a complex cultural
study the book is a dazzling and eloquent work of scholarship, easy to read and
internalise. This is a book of ideas as well as interpretation. It's an
enthralling adventure of a read as well as an ambitiously accomplished and
thought-provoking study.

As this is a work which relates
closely to my own area of research (Western travellers in East Tibet in the early 20th Century), it is undoubtedly a book which I will return to and pore over in
far greater detail in times still to come. But as an initial read, my main
impressions are that this is a work which will appeal to a wide range of interest
areas - for those concerned with comparative studies of colonialism; those
interested in Chinese minority cultures; borderland studies; historical
geography and exploration; ethnography, etc., - it will sit welcomely on the
bookshelves of many different disciplines across the humanities and social
sciences. The only real problems I had with the book, as such, I later realised
were essentially derived from the main personalities the book is devoted to -
the book is structured in two halves, and each half essentially mirrors the man
who is its focus. Part one is neat and concise, rather like George Forrest;
whereas Part Two, appears longer and looser, and is somewhat unpleasant, rather
like the personality it sets out to portray - to which I conclude I'm not much enamoured
of Joseph Rock, despite the fact that I clearly recognise, for all his many faults,
he was and remains a fascinating figure of study. I was, however, wholly enamoured of this book, and so I recommend it highly.

~

Erik Mueggler

You
can listen to an interview with Erik Mueggler on how he came to research and
write 'The Paper Road' here.